Abstract:

My senior essay is aimed at asking whether artificial agency is possible, and examining the ethical ramifications of an affirmative answer. In the course of my paper, I accept that agency ought to be defined on a continuum in which there can be more or less autonomous entities that can both be said to be agents. Although artificial agency almost certainly falls below human “full moral agency” on this spectrum, and despite the reality that human programmers are likely responsible for the actions of most computers, I conclude that artificial moral agents could still exist. Because the other minds problem is unresolved, it would be incongruent with our treatment of humans to assume that robots that appear to be acting autonomously are not in fact autonomous. My discussion closes with a brief survey of what I see as some of the important questions that must be answered next if my analysis is correct.